Ultimate Approval of a Believer's Work

Well, this is part 4. And you're going to get part 5 next week. No, we'll move on to lesson number 9 next week. We might even kind of touch on it a little bit today depending upon how things go. So we're still in lesson 8. We're on the last two questions.

And if you will, go ahead and turn to 2 Timothy 2.15. And we'll get into that. But I want to start with a quick review. It's been a while. We've been working through Lesson 8 for a bit. Just a little bit of where we were in question 12, 13, 14 just the last week.

We talked about word fighting. And we talked about the fact that there is nothing useful in that. And Paul uses mathematical terms that there's zero value in terms of word fighting. He used the term unprofitable and worthless. And Wayne reminded us that he's seen churches split over these types of things. We also talked about the plow. Remember how we use the term catastrophe as the ground turning over, it's thrown down, the soil just gets torn up, especially when it comes to a new believer or a young believer getting into these word fights and you see churches really through a lot when the soil gets turned over with word fighting. Unprofitable and worthless.

Question 13, we talked about being diligent. Paul said, Timothy, be diligent. Make haste, exert yourself, be eager, get after it, is what we talked about. But the diligence is always in the word of God, which is where we're gonna kind of move to today. And we talked about the fact that diligence is not something that the old man does. That's a new creation thing. So it's not a work, it's not an effort that the old man does in order to earn acceptance before the Lord. It's a diligence and focusing on God's word as a believer.

And then question 14, Dakamas. It's the testing for approval, right? And It's an approval after examination. Hebrews 4.11 came up. It belongs in that same vein. Be diligent to enter that rest. So it was that same word.

So this week, we're in 2 Timothy 2.15. If someone could go ahead and read that aloud for us, that'd be great. Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, greatly dividing the word of truth. Okay. Is that King James? It is. Okay.

So, let's read it from the NASB. New American Standard says, Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of God. So I think there's four things here in one sentence, whether you're reading from King James or New American Standard. I think both are probably pretty good to compare here. But what are those things?

Be diligent. We've talked about that. Approved. We've talked about that. Remember the coin? We talked about how the coin was a representation of the truth. It was approved, not a counterfeit. So, what's left here? There's two other things that are left here in verse 15. First of all, who does the approving? And then, what the work actually is. So, question 15. Who makes the decision about the quality of the work? Your parents? Your elder? Your wife? Your buddies?

Who makes the decision about the quality of the work? Remember, Paul is talking to Timothy. Be diligent. Show yourself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed. Yes, this is the Lord's approval, right? You guys agree? That's the only approval that matters. The only approval that matters. Your notes say, the words to God are to be understood with the verbal form to present. It is, do your best to present yourself to God approved. How do you do your best to present yourself to God approved?

Boy, you can really get in a tangle with that one. One of the expositors' commentary says, "...that needeth not to be ashamed, a workman who has no cause for shame when his work is being inspected." Literally, the verb can be rendered, not made ashamed. But let's flip that for a minute.

What would it look like to be ashamed? If God is doing the approving, If the work of Timothy were not approved, what would that look like for Timothy? What would that look like for us? That he wasn't following the word, or following the instruction of Paul in this case. that he told him, you know, like, guard the truth, guard it, and if he wasn't doing that, if he wasn't being, you know, able to, you know, stymie the bad teaching, or he didn't care about it, or anything like that, I think he would be ashamed in front of God if he wasn't doing the things Paul had told him to do. Okay, so if Timothy didn't follow those instructions that had been handed down to him, and remember, sound doctrine was very important to Paul in the first portion of this chapter and all of 1st and 2nd Timothy, so if he didn't handle the Word of God accurately, there would be an ashamed...

Go ahead, Mike. You know, sometimes when I'll put it this way. One of the great benefits of being a teacher is that you get to spend time putting the class together. So that requires reading, sometimes reading what someone else says about the verses. But the real test is, as you're going through, is this really what God's Word says? So you go back to the scripture and stay there. Maybe you have to define a few words.

You don't have to have a degree in Greek, but it helps to be familiar with the tools of Greek so that the criteria is, are you defining or accurately portraying as close as you understand what God's Word really says. And I think that from God's perspective, His Word is invaluable. I don't think He cares what a commentator wrote, necessarily, or human opinion. It's what He says. And it takes a while, I think, to maybe grow into understanding that Really, what I'm learning by reading and studying, study is a good word here, is what does God's word really say?

I think sometimes teachers get a little excited. Yeah, they do. They get an idea. Yeah. I have an idea. Nobody's ever seen this before. Not in this verse. And we build conferences around those ideas sometimes. We get really excited. But this word present, let's look at that word. Paristime.

It means to place beside or near to present. It's the word for setting something down in front of someone for inspection. presenting it. What do you think? And it carries the sense of showing the quality a person or thing exhibits. So, we talked about this a little bit last week. It's the word for being presented in the Holy of Holies. And this is the idea that Paul has for Timothy. Present.

Colossians 1.22 He reconciled you in order to, same word, present you before him holy and blameless and beyond reproach. It's the same verb there. And then six verses later in Colossians, Paul labors and he says, so that we may present every man complete in Christ. So when you hold Colossians and you hold this verse side by side, you get the position, condition, distinction, I think. and it's sitting in one word. He presents you holy and blameless, and that one is finished, and it's his doing. And then in verse 15, we're asked to present your work.

That's what Timothy's being asked. He's asked to present his work. So the man is already accepted, But the workmanship is what comes up for review. Does that track? Okay. I'm trying to figure out the greeky geeky stuff. That to show is aorist active infinitive. So aorist is a past. So it's not like we continually present ourselves. It doesn't seem like. That's a position, right? Yeah, so that's what I'm... when you said that, I think that's going from a positional, you know, and it's for the purpose of, the infinitive purpose of, to show ourselves approved.

That word, present yourself to God. Not just approved. So, He's not only the one who grades the work, He's the one you walk it over to and set it down in front of. So you've got, you are approved, but the things that you teach will be presented before God and looked at. Is that tracking?

Look over in 2 Corinthians 10.18. It uses this word too. For it is not he who commands himself that is approved, but he whom the Lord commends. And Paul had done this, hadn't he? He'd already been through this through his life. He's in prison and he's talking to Timothy about handling the Word of God. Be diligent here. Show yourself approved to God. How do we do that?

I think you have to understand who's doing the approving and when it was approved and is it a self-improvement plan. This version was used by Lance Latham when he started Guana Clubs. And I think through the time that a lot of it goes back to trying to be approved by doing certain things. And I think that's important to understand that we are already approved at the point of our petition because of Christ's work on the promises and believing them.

Do you guys agree? If God grades you Are you free to tell the truth even if no one's listening? Romans 14.4 kind of puts a fence around this. Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls. Not your master, his. Sometimes we, in question 15, we're talking about who does the approving, right? So people keep asking the Lord, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to be an evangelist? Do you have an assignment for me? Do you have a task for me?

We talked about that a little bit. This is the task, right here. Paul gave it to Timothy, stay diligent in the word of God. You know, just looking at it, kind of expanding out instead of just, excuse me, this one verse. This is all about wrangling about words, you know, and we'll get into everything next with Hymenaeus and Philetus and all those. This is in the context, I think, of wrangling over words. And I think he's saying, you know, don't be ashamed. of the truth. Don't be ashamed of the truth. Don't be ashamed, you know, because we just can't, you know, remind them about righteous words which are useless and leads to ruin.

Now we're into it. Just be diligent. Don't get tangled up in this. Be true to, you know, understand the word and don't be ashamed. that you know the truth and you have the truth. When all these people come and try and wrangle you and try to get you involved in all this stuff, you're accurately handling the word of truth. I think this is a warning. It's just not to get caught up or be dragged off or that, but don't be ashamed of it.

You know the truth. Stick to it. Yes, sometimes my kids will tell me they have a Bible study with their friends or something like that, and they'll say, well, God's Word says this, and then somebody will say, but I feel like, or I think that, What he's really trying to say is this, and all of a sudden they end up on a tangent rabbit trail that is not diligently focused on what the Word of God said. I think that's exactly right, Courtney. I think that's what Paul is encouraging Timothy.

Don't be ashamed. Stay at home in the Word of God. Because that's where God examines. But we love to ad-lib. You know, man loves to add his own thoughts. And he's saying, and he's in a cell, a prison cell. I mean, he's almost certainly going to be, you know, executed soon.

And his encouragement is, stay in the Word of God, because that's what God examines. And that's what diligence means. and He does the approving, right? So, if we think about that for ourselves, if we stick to the Word of God, we remain a student of the Word of God, and we not be ashamed of how that might offend others, God approves that, even though man might not approve that.

Your neighbor may not like what you have to say. Maybe it's because you didn't say it kindly. That's a thing. But that's not the situation here. This is a situation of, are you communicating the truth that I'm handing down to you? Don't be ashamed. God approves that. Mike.

I was reading this week about why philosophy doesn't fit in Christianity. Because philosophy is man-created and man-centered, and it has nothing to do with God's Word. So it's an intellectual's attempt to explain God's Word from the natural mind, through philosophy. So if somebody says, hey, I hear what you're saying, Mike, Manuel Kant doesn't say that. Yeah, he wouldn't buy that. He didn't like that. So how do you reconcile?

Or even more succinct to that is, well, I've studied John Calvin, and I think he might be right, or R.C. Sproul, or one of those guys. a charismatic guy or a Catholic theologian or whatever, you know, and boy, they make some sense, some sense. But I think God's Word occupies a unique place, but only in a Christian environment, that it is God's Word. It's Him. It's His thoughts. It's His proclamation about who He is and what He's done. What if somebody said, well, that's not what Mike said, or that's not what Miles said?

You could say to them, fine, because it really is, what does God have to say? And that goes back to rightly dividing the word of truth, isn't it? And that's your responsibility, and that's exactly the same responsibility that Paul was telling Timothy. Now, Paul came with an apostolic authority, but we as teachers, you have to go and take these words that we tell you, and share with you, and that we're convicted of, and rightly divide that as well. Because being diligent in the Word of God is the way you will be examined and approved.

It just doesn't hold for teachers, it holds for every... Every Christian. Every believer. Every person. Yeah. We had lunch yesterday with a college couple that we've known forever, and they're not believers. And he said to me, well, what do you read? Keep your mind busy. I said, the Bible. He looked at me like, you mean you don't read? I said, no, I never read novels, books. The Bible is too exhaustive, I'll never run out of it. I don't have enough time to finish what's actually in there. You know, that's kind of also, I think, the difference between, always when I think of philosophy, We have a philosopher in our family. And it's like, nearest I can say, it's like pinning jello to a wall.

There's no basis, there's no structure, there's no anything. It evolves and goes wherever it wants. Whereas we have the Word, and that's our basis, and that's our rock, the foundation of all of our belief. It's His Word, and we trust it's the Word of God. And so we have a foundation to go to. Philosophers have nothing. They'll go wherever their mind will take them.

And I think that's the difference with us. You know, there's other religions and other things, but I think we have historical backing. I go back to the evidence that man's a verdict. Josh McDowell. There's a whole lot of concrete stuff that goes with our truth. The truth is ultimately the foundation. It's historical. Yeah, but there's a lot of things that back it up. We have both historical and just that it is the Word of God. And that's different than most other religions.

We were talking about Mormonism last night, actually. We have another vision today, through the hat. Nick was very enthralled with talking through the hat or seeing what's ever in the hat from Joseph Smith and what he sees. Just no real basis. And we have the foundation. And again, it's just different than others. You mean the seer stones or not? Yeah. I don't know. Nick was talking about the hat. I'm not 100% sure. Joseph Smith's hat or something. He looked into the hat and he saw something or whatever. I don't know.

Well, J.D., I'm just thinking along, you were talking earlier, you used the word responsibility, and that just kind of resonated with me. I mean, Paul's talking to Timothy, who is in a responsible role in the local churches, and we're talking about teachers, and that's, yeah, that's a lot of it. I appreciated that in Romans 14.

You know, to his master, his servant, stands or falls. And there is a responsibility as someone who teaches the Word. Obviously all believers have a responsibility to faithfulness to the Word, but especially as a teacher in the local assembly. It's like you, the Lord, The Lord is very serious about teachers being faithful to the Word. Being faithful to the Word is a matter of faith in the Lord, because trusting that what He said is true. That's just continuing in that faith to teach the Word. for what it says. To walk by faith means that you have a dependence upon an authority.

And we really like to, like I said, add to. And the Sin Nature loves to get a little bit creative. It's like, you can read the Word, that's cool. But, I mean, let's go ahead and bend this to my pleasure. Just a little bit. To make sure it fits what I want. And that responsibility to stay diligent and accurately handle the Word is something that was very important to Paul. Question 16. What does accurately handling the Word of Truth mean? Talked a little bit about that.

But that word handling, the Word of Truth, There's a Greek, you want to get greeky geeky. It's the word orthotomeo. Orthos. Where do we get, what kind of English words will we get from that? Orthodontist. Huh? Orthodontist. Orthodontist? Orthopedic? Yeah, so there's the orthos and then there's the tomeo. So orthos is straight, upright. What does an orthodontist do? Makes your teeth straight.

Anybody need one of those? My wife reminded me that I might need to go back to the orthodontist at some point. Sorry babe. Because I was talking about my own teeth. You wear braces for a reason, why? To keep them straight. What do you go to an orthopedic to do?

To make straight something that's not, it's crooked or it's not functioning right. We got to straighten that out, get that back in alignment. And then that to mayo means to cut. So the word here is to cut straight. And the King James calls it rightly dividing. In the Greek Old Testament, it is used of making a straight path.

Proverbs 3.6 says, he will cut your paths straight. So, cutting it straight. What picture does that put in your head? It's the orthopedic, it's the orthodontist.

Vincent defines the word to cut straight as paths, to hold a straight course, to make straight, to handle rightly. He says, the thought is that the minister of the gospel is to present the truth rightly, not abridging it, not handling it as a pretender, not making it a matter of wordly strife. but treating it honestly and fully in a straightforward manner. Sometimes you share the word of God, maybe you share the gospel, and they want to go off on an evolutionary rabbit trail or something of those natures, a philosophical bent. But your responsibility is to hold straight the word of God. Yeah, Mike. So how do I know? I mean, what verifies in my heart that I'm tracking right? What do you guys think? How do you know when you're not holding or cutting it straight, rightly dividing? I listened to a farmer teaching this passage one time.

This was pre-Starlink and whatever. In those days, if you wanted to cut a straight line with your plow, you'd find an object on the far side of the field to track. But at night, the only thing you could see is a light on the horizon. So we found a light on the horizon and followed it all the way across the field. only to get all the way across and realize it was a car driving down the road. So he was using that because the interlayer here has keeping on a straight course, right?

And if your eyes on the wrong thing, I mean, you're going the wrong way, right? And so that is the risk. We get our eyes on the wrong thing. That's when we start cutting the wrong course through scripture. And I guess I'm thinking here in terms of Colossians, where we're studying for the main service. And Paul keeps telling the Colossians, keep your eyes on Christ. Your eyes have got to be on Christ, or you're going to get off track.

I think that car, in the context of 2 Timothy, Wordy strife. I think that's the car that's going across the horizon. You take God's word, you get wordy with it, you get into a word battle, and all of a sudden you're following the car off to the side, as opposed to staying in verse 15. which is straight cutting, straight forward. And that's what Paul is trying to remind Timothy about, is that that car off on the horizon is getting off into a wordy strife, word battle. Yeah.

You know, I kind of think, taking Miles' example, is, and the engineer, you take a point and you go. I think the practicality of it, you know, I can have the Lord as my focus and things like that, but I think rightly dividing is to make sure you don't take anything out of context, and usually that means conferring with other scripture that validates the scripture you're looking at. If you take something and you take it way out of context without a different point of reference, you're in the car. If you have two points in scripture, this is the practicality of it for me, is that I'm looking at something, see if scripture verifies what I'm what I'm looking at, that other scripture will verify that.

So there's two points of reference. Context, context, context. That I'm not following the car lights or whatever. The practicality of it. Yes, I always keep the focus on the Lord, yes, but when I'm looking at the word, I find it and I want to find another reference like we do here.

Look at Romans 12, look at Hebrews, look at Colossians. There's always a second point or something that gives me direction that I'm rightly dividing the word in a practical sense. I wanted to say that there's a difference between law and grace, so there's a division there. And if you're not following right in dividing, you're going to put law and grace together and it just doesn't fit.

Yeah. There's a lot of dividing that has to be done with regards to context. That's super critical. I think in this particular case, Paul's really... I don't know that he had that full context in his mind at the moment. I think it was don't get caught up in that word battle and get drug over there when you should be rightly plowing straight right here. But for us, having the full counsel of God's word available, that rightly dividing absolutely 100% requires comparing scripture to scripture. Yeah, Mike.

The reason I ask the question, because if you go back to first chapter, verse 14, Paul tells Timothy, guard through the Holy Spirit. who dwells in you, the treasure which has been entrusted to you. So we haven't talked much about the work of the Spirit in this enterprise, and He's the one that keeps you straight. He's the one that reveals to you exactly what the Word means, what God means. So there's a dependence on Him, I would say a growing dependence on Him as you go along, to keep you straight. to keep you not getting off into babbling about words and stuff. Because his goal is to glorify Christ in you. So he wants to reveal Christ to you through the Word in order to begin to see, behold the glory of the Lord. reflects his glory, it's got to be accurate or otherwise it's not him. I want you guys to hear that because I think it's really important. It's the Holy Spirit's role in your life to keep you on the straight. That old me monster, he wants to go run rabbit trails all day.

Macaulay says, about this word. First, it has been translated rightly dividing as if it referred to the proper analysis of the word into its parts. Second, others have translated it holding a straight course. It seems it would be best to retain both ideas and translate handling a right the word. It is by means of proper handling of the word of truth that the command to be a diligent workman is carried out by the Holy Spirit. And I'll add that to Macaulay based on Mike and his reference to previous verses in this passage. So if you take that concept that Macaulay's bringing to this truth, divide it rightly and hold a straight course with it. and trust the spirit to do it.

One is about where the line falls, the other is about where you stay on them. Figure out the line and stay on it. So, yeah, I think we've talked a lot about examples of how that functions in our own life. We get to verses 16 through 18 moving here, and he's moving through thought. Avoid worldly and empty chatter. Their talk will spread like gangrene. Men who have gone astray from the truth saying that the resurrection has already taken place. Things like that. So he's going to give him what the crooked path looks like and he puts names on it like gangrene. So that's where we're going to go next week. We're at time at the moment. So we'll pick up with Lesson 9 next week. Most of you will be otherwise occupied. Let's pray.

Father, how we thank you that, first of all, you've given us your Holy Spirit to illuminate us to the truth of your Word. You've given us your Word to keep us on a straight path. And it's our choice to believe by faith what you have said and to stay there and to remain focused on the dependence of what you've said. And so we pray that we would continue to rightly divide your word as we study, as we learn what precious truths you have for us. It's in your name we pray. Amen.